Golden Oldies

There is a restaurant at the corner of State and Valerio, built about an impressive ficus macrophelia. In its current incarnation, the restaurant is known as IHOP, which decodes to International House of Pancakes. Native Santa Barbarans and those of us who carpet-bagged it in back in the good old days remember it as The Blue Onion. The food was good then.


If this were the estimable Harpers' Magazine feature, Index, I would have the percentages at hand, as in percentage of Santa Barbara population over the age of fifty who have had one or more joints replaced by the tall, elegant John Gainor, M.D. Indeed, I would be a part of the percentages. Ah, times change. During my callow youth in Los Angeles, a cosmetic plastic surgeon built a name from rebuilding the noses of young ladies. Most males of my contemporaries, to their credit, were looking at other parts on young women; a group of us were looking for and finding significant lack of bump in the bridge of the nose or an overall slenderness that gave us to conclude that there went a Newman nose. Now we see the effect of John Gainor. Even as I made this observation at coffee this morning, Steve Beisner, editor of the Inkbyte blog, flexed his right arm. Shoulder, bicycle accident, he said, mimicking Vladimir Nabokov's description of the death of Lolita's mother (picnic, lightning). In my Saturday workshop, Bruce Paine has a Gainor hip, and that splendid actress, Christine, has a Gainor knee.


Hardly anyone outside Santa Barbara knows about ABC-Clio, which is short form for American Bibliographical Center, Clio Press. Clio of course is the muse of history. Part but not the entire reason I no longer work for ABC-Clio is related to the fact that hardly anyone outside Santa Barbara knows about it, but that is another matter, a long, perhaps rancorous matter, off the subject of my observation that it sometimes seems that everyone in Santa Barbara except persons in the real estate profession has at some time or other worked for ABC-Clio. When the discovery is made, there is a moment of pause, a moment of reflection, a moment of wondering. Admission of having worked for ABC-Clio is like admitting to having been married once or perhaps even twice before, or if that comparison doesn't work, of having been a conscientious objector while the country was/is at war. ABC-Clio is a perfectly reputable publishing venture, and it has published some remarkable things that librarians, academicians, scholars would find useful and admiral. Like any publishing venture, it attracted quirky individuals such as myself to work there and rise up the Peter-Principle ladder; as well it brought some notable authors as well as some quirky and downright disagreeable ones. But those are not the issues; the real issue is the number of persons who have been employed there, how long they stayed, and why they left. Although I have not worked there since being fired in 1980, the secretary to the President still sends emails in which she speaks of the atmosphere that permeated the halls, as though it had been sprayed from some room freshener. "Weren't those the times?" she asks. And one of my assistants, who left long before me, still remembers my birthday, and refers to "those remarkable days." I still see the man who hired me and who I replaced, when he took an early retirement, a widower now, owner of what appears to be a permanent hobble, but somehow radiant of an inner spine. "You lasted longer there than I thought you would," he remarked last year. Sometimes in the Y hot tub or on a late night run at Von's market, I see one of the librarians, who left in order to write books with a mystical bent. "You left your chakras wide open," he laughs the sound of one Zen laughing. And there is Tracy, whom I see every year at the Writers' Conference and who worked at ABC-Clio years after I had left. "I mentioned your name once," she reported, "and there was dead silence except for one man with a beard who has an office but is never seen in it."

Would ABC-Clio have worked anyplace but Santa Barbara? Perhaps there is an answer there, a metaphor, a throughline. How do you rationalize wearing a striped necktie with a hound's tooth jacket? the publisher once asked me. I have never in my life rationalized what necktie I wear, I replied, and that was the beginning of the end. My end at ABC-Clio.

You also qualify as someone with tenure in Santa Barbara is you remember the days when Mom's, the Italian restaurant near Cota and Union was actually a restaurant, not a boutique, and Mom actually prowled the kitchen, occasionally muttering things about Arnoldi's, the restaurant across the street with whom Mom's family had been feuding for some years. "How," Mom wanted to know, "can they call that--that mush--split pea soup?"

And there was a roller skating rink next to an equally defunct restaurant called Talk of the Town, and there was not only a greasy spoon diner on Coast Village Road called Gino's, but it had a lavish mural, depicting many of the locals. I came along a tad too late to be included on the mural, but there, riding an elephant bareback, was Helene Merchand, who indeed kept an elephant in the enclosed pasture across the street from what has become the fortress inhabited by Oprah.

One of the things that impresses you about Europe is the permanence of places and things. Some of out activities during WW II seemed to fly in the face of this permanence, but it was rather nice to be nudged just so by Brian Fagan and told, mind, you're stepping on Jane Austin, and when you asked a particular publican if, as the sign on an ancient ceiling beam advertised, Christopher Marlowe bunged his head at this spot, he smiled. "Probably not. But he might of."
Things are not so permanent in southern California nor the Central Coast, nor, for that matter, farther north, say San Francisco, where few of the locals remember Market Street's nickname, "The Slot."

All things are a flowing, sage Heraclitus says,
And a tawdry cheapness shall outlast our days...says Ezra Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.

Things do change. To remember some of them before the change is splendid; doing so helps impart atmosphere to text. It also serves as a reminder that you are in transition from one time to another, giving you pause to wonder if when persons hold the door open for you at, say, Peet's coffee and tea, they are doing so from politeness or recognition that you are in transition.

Having a memory of people and places is akin to walking around with a power stick of history.

L.A. is change incarnate; Santa Barbara is close behind; much of the British Museum is wired. If archaeologists move quickly enough, they can score some goodies at building sites. And you, with your power stick of history; you are memory, strolling into the wind.

The Archaeology of the Desk

My mother was by no means tall or large-boned; perhaps five feet four inches on a slender frame. As it happens with so many persons, things, and events held over from the past, the memory of her is of a large presence, a comfortable and comforting presence, a person to whom stranger and friend alike confided amazing secrets from within the heart’s remotest cache.

The desk she left me—a Queen Anne secretary, to be precise—is of a physical size and design infinitely more suited to her size and neatness than my six-foot-three-inch tendency to sprawl and to leave things unfiled. I keep the desk as part of an on-going souvenir of the turmoil and celebration of a mother-son relationship.

From time to time, my attempts to restore order to said Queen Anne secretary—a euphemism if ever there was one for trying in despair to find some misplaced thing—produce an avalanche. From one of the nooks or slots or drawers, there cascades a tumble of business cards—some mine from the many detours of my working life—and small envelopes such as the moisturized napkins given by barbecue and fast-food restaurants. There are artifacts from my passion for fountain pens, a pencil sharpener in the shape of a typewriter, given me as a birthday present by a group of students at least twenty years ago; reminders to call two doctors, one a client, the other a man who yanked me out of the seas of cancer some years back, several containers of saline solution with which to ease the passage of contact lenses in and out of my eyes, a pair of mini-speakers which, when the mood strikes them, enhance my laptop sound system, a photo of a dear old pal with long, floppy ears (a Blue-tick hound named Edward), and the now scrunched envelope containing the grade sheet for the past semester at the University, which has cleverly contrived to hide a post card with two remarkable photos of houses, taken by Gregory
Spaid, the originals now residing in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

With some regularity, the avalanche of envelopes contains a white packet about the size of a credit card, its label printed in Spanish, its contents advertised as having the miraculous properties of power. Power to what? You ask. Ah, there is the simple wonder of the packet. Power to do things. Power to ward off things such as sloth, procrastination, and stuff. Sight of the envelope always comes as a surprise; I have to think for a moment, wondering how I came by this miraculous envelope. Then I remember: fifteen years or so ago in the large downtown marketplace in Guadalajara, purchased for twenty pesos at a time when one dollar equaled fifteen hundred pesos. “How much power can there be in the envelope,” I asked the vendor, “when it is sold for so little?”

The vendor, a small, well-dressed man with a cynical bearing, shook his head. “Los Angeles,” he said. “West side. Fairfax or Hamilton High, maybe University High. Two years high school Spanish.”

“Fairfax,” I confessed, “and actually, I started the Spanish in junior high.”

“What they didn’t teach you,” the vendor said, “was to look inside.” He shook his head. “They teach you mirar, to look at, but they don’t teach you buscar, to look for.”

In the years since I have purchased the envelope, the closest I have come to examining the powder inside the envelope is to poke at its sides, trying to guess by feel if the powder is sand, sugar, powdered milk. At various times I have suspected all three, concluding it is probably sand, the least expensive and, thus, at whatever price the envelope is sold, the greatest ROI, return on investment.

That, of course, is the mirar, to look at approach.

With the buscar, the look for approach, I don’t have to sift the envelope through my fingers. I know what’s inside. I know what the contents of the envelope of the great power are.

It is imagination.

Once again, I return the envelope to the archaeological dig site of my mother’s desk, where it becomes lost under the layers of other artifacts, waiting to be discovered once again as I look for instead of merely looking at.

Junk--the Verb and the Noun

My dog, Sally, has outed me.

I am neither neat nor tidy. At some point in the day, I manage to appear neat and tidy, but soon enough--all too soon--cosmic forces collide most notably with my shirt, tie, sweater (if the weather warrants). If my jackets often slip under the radar, the back seat of the Camry makes up for it.

Work areas--the worked-over two-car garage now euphemistically referred to as "the library," and that portion of my room where a desk, computer, printer, and bookshelves seem to present themselves like dogs up for adoption at the animal shelter--become a multiple and mixed metaphor, a Sargasso Sea, a Bermuda Triangle, a mine field, a cemetery.

This is not something I have set forth with deliberation to achieve, nor does it emerge from any desire on my part to rebel against authority or conventions (Writing is my ally in that struggle. The condition has been with me as far back as memory extends; it is best defined by two pleasant but remarkably different forces, an archaeologist and my late father.

Brian Fagan, even though now emeritus from the academy, is a world-class archaeologist. I first met him as editor to client, but by now, at least a dozen books later, that line is seriously blurred. We meet, as friends do, to gossip, drink coffee, and describe the world to one another, only incidentally addressing a particular chapter or two of a particular book in progress. "Archaeologists," Fagan maintains with voluble force, "are glorified junk dealers. They cherish items you would be hard put to charge ten cents for at a garage sale. What is the archaeological wing of a distinguished museum but a well-labeled rubbish heap?"

Somewhere within the clutter of my desk is an empty Altoids Mint box. True enough, I did eat the mints, but having found at one time a web site filled with interesting second uses for Altoids tins, I keep the box, eternally hopeful a second- or third-generation use for it will emerge. Besides, think of the range of social and historical significance were my one Altoids tin to grow into a collection, demonstrating size, flavor, and design.

So there you have an example of the Fagan effect on me: Altoids tin as artifact; junk as definition, trash as cultural evidence. Did the Cro-Magnon not have bad breath or dyspepsia? What they did not have was a tin to carry about their Altoids, and so my wannabe collection assumes the status of a tree ring or core sampling.

Jake, my father, was not an academic, but he was hardwired with neatness and organizational skills of such significance that he drifted into a radical change in occupation. Auctioneers fought for his skills in preparing commercial sites for sale at auction, these skills including an ability to make junk look important. "Make junk look important, and people will pay for it," he told me, shortly before yet another of his demonstrations to me of what worked in life and what did not work. At the same auction, a dustpan filled with the lees of a large floor I'd just swept, sold for seven dollars. The contents of the dustpan included sundry screws, bolts, and a few brass washers. Dumped into a corrugated box with neatly trimmed edges, then labeled as Miscellaneous Machine Parts, the contents of the dustpan brought in more money than the chuck of a lathe, worth at the time at least twenty-five dollars.

I am at heart a collector. Over time I have collected pulp mystery magazines, pulp science fiction magazines,cereal boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, baseball trading cards, miniature Oriental rugs once used as a premium in Murad cigarettes, lithographed drawings of airplanes included in packages of the now-defunct Wings cigarettes, Big-Little Books, playing cards with interesting patterns, kachina dolls emblematic of Hopi and Zuni supernatural figures. I won't talk about National Geographic magazines or toys from boxes of Cracker-Jacks, or those old Dell paperback mysteries with the maps on the back cover because everybody collected those, and not a word about my current passion, fountain pens.

There is something comfortably filling about having such collections, of a piece with having had an enormous steak dinner at Gallagher's or Smith & Wollensky in Manhattan. These collected things are artifacts of a time, a place, a way of life, a culture. True enough, they take space in the garage that could otherwise be used for, say, cars; they occupy space in closets and drawers that could provide splendid homes for first-aid items, clothing, cleaning implements, things bought in large quantity from COSTCO.

As a young man, Brian Fagan worked in Africa, in fact, with Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. At one point, he relates, he found a small, hand-shaped wedge used to split logs, and was told, Well done. He is not likely to go on digs now so his sifting and searching is mostly in libraries or direct interviews with men and women still working the fields. I liken his fascination for wrist watches to something more than the status symbol of owning an expensive time piece. Even though I can and often do wear a Timex, I can relate to the sense of beauty one senses under the crystal and well into the inner workings of a hand-made watch.

With some exceptions, I can lay my hands on most of the stories that appeared in the issues of Black Mask Magazine I collected, mourning with each new addition to the collection the fact of the demise of Black Mask before I could submit stories to it. Somewhere in that garage-cum-study, there is an actual Black Mask cover, announcing that within these flimsy pages, you could see a story by Dashiell Hammett.

Junk, Jake would say, using the Yiddish word tinnif for it, gold for you who wants it and even more for the person who owns it and knows you want it. This was not said with scorn, mind you, but with the vision of a man who kept himself, his home, and one of his kids neat. He, on the other hand, had a virtually photographic memory, obviating his need after a time to keep a collection of The Daily Racing Form, that lovely data base of equine velocity relationships, the sines, cosines, and tangents, as they were, of what Horse A did against Horse B over six furlongs on a fast track.

Junk. What we once used and threw out--and which becomes valued by someone else. The detritus of one society, the artifacts and relics of another. Also the items we thought we wanted and can no longer live with. Items we once thought contained the lightning in a bottle of beauty. Or meaning.

Found art; unrelated cast-offs, put in proximity by a person with "an eye for beauty."

I once saw, hanging on the wall of the church at Acoma Pueblo, a sconce of preternatural loveliness, a candle within it casting mystical light through the textured surface of the glass in which it was embedded. Closer inspection revealed the secrets of the sconce and candle holder.

The metal from which the sconce was cut, bent, teased, and painted was once a tin bearing a Hormel ham. It was later revealed to me that the glass candle holder was originally a container for Welch's grape jelly.

Can anything be found in or made from the clutter in my work area? Hope springs eternal in the breast of man, Alexander Pope has told us. There are ideas and bits of energy in those piles. Like the archaeologist, I sift through them for artifacts, hearing Jake's voice as a reminder that if it is treated with respect, possibly, just possibly, something might come.